No Sacred Cows

Scepticism served medium rare

Category: Essays

  • Influencer Interruptus

    Influencer Interruptus

    When even solitude needs a tripod. One man’s dawn swim meets the selfie apocalypse. After an hour’s swim at dawn in glorious solitude, the sea smooth as glass, the horizon glowing like molten silver – I thought I had the beach to myself: two kilometres of unspoilt quiet. Then, inevitably, modern civilisation arrived. A lone…

  • When the Brain Breaks

    In May 2025 Jia Tolentino wrote in the New Yorker about what she calls her “broken brain”. She means the fog that settles when words slip out of focus, when news feeds pile horror upon horror, and when reality itself feels unreliable. “I feel a troubling kind of opacity in my brain lately – as…

  • Tattooed Eyebrows, Vegan Dogs, and the Heat Death of Thought

    Looking through my crystal ball… Democracies will erode under the weight of attention spans shorter than a hamster’s. The planet will heat, then hiccup, then wheeze, then expire, because the best we can do is redesign shampoo bottles to save the turtles. And we will still waste time arguing over the colour. Eventually, we might…

  • Kenneth William “Bill” Wedderburn – Part II

    # Postscript: Bill Wedderburn, Robert and the return to Inveresk There is a final part of Bill Wedderburn’s story that deserves to stand separately from the account of his remarkable legal and political career. When I met Bill at the House of Lords in 2001, he already knew of Robert Wedderburn as a historical figure.…